Staffer John W. Gonzalez wrote an OpEd piece for Thanksgiving about how a story he wrote years ago regarding “a destitute blind woman being robbed of the fixings for her Thanksgiving meal” was a lesson “on the enormity of San Antonio’s generosity.”

He’d forwarded me a copy, and I was especially interested by the part about how the paper’s librarian called him after he wrote the story to tell him that when she filed the clip of his story, she had found a previously existing clip file on the woman — who had also been burglarized before Christmas.

I wondered if we still had the clip file — and what all was in there. John had copies of his stories in his own files, but they did not have dates written on them. He thought the burglary happened in 1972, 1973 or 1974.

At first, my hopes were dashed because I could not find the file in our cabinets. However, I then remembered that we have some older clip files that were converted to microfiche. Despite some bad alphabetizing, I found not one, but two files on Carlotta Castillo (the attached slideshow has the contents of both files).

The stories written by John Gonzalez were about the events of Thanksgiving 1972. The same Mrs. Castillo had been robbed of $50 in December 1970. As it turned out she had been robbed a third time in 1973 when “bandits burst into [her] home and stole groceries, drugs, and household goods.” The articles about the initial burglary don’t mention a police report, but the articles about the second and third break-ins do.

Each time the community generously responded.

But the story doesn’t end there. In 1980, CPS threated to turn her water off. In the words of City Water Board director of credit and collections W. C. Billings: “We’re not in the welfare business. … We’re not in the position to change the rules for elderly people.”

Michael Quintanilla covered that story, and when I asked him about it, he said he remembered her — and that his editor said his story should be distributed with “hankies.” He recounted Mrs. Castillo’s tale of going out in the hurricane-induced rain with a bar of soap –her last bath — and, because she was blind, getting lost in the backyard.

He remembered the “welfare business” quote being turned into a headline and readers being outraged (unfortunately, I did not find that story in the clip file), but once again, San Antonio responded.

Regardless of what you think of Mrs. Castillo’s plight, San Antonio continues to show that it is full of generous, warm-hearted people. We can’t ever lose that.